i doubt _ck_’s main reason for leaving the project was money – she just wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thrown so much time and effort into a project that had gone off at a tangent to what it set out to do, and then its lead developer (actually, only developer) quit. _ck_ was basically left holding the bag, and (again, my own opinion) it may have appeared to her that things weren’t going to change for the better any time soon.

Your idea’s a lovely one, but a little impractical. Given the lack of documentation, huge changes to the codebase, and amount of hardcoded outputs – writing any sort of plugin for BBpress easily becomes somewhat of a quagmire. It gets to the stage where the cost (in terms of time) for developing the plugin would be huge, and i’m not sure that donations from the board are ever going to come close to matching that.

A slightly modified suggestion, is that if someone pays for a developer to edit/fix/create something for their own BBpress installation, then they could donate that code to the site. That’d be far more likely to produce tangible results.

Look, the top prize is most likely not going to be a zillion bucks, but it its not a bad idea to stick a steroid shot in the plugin development arm and get some more people fired up (or fired up once again) about bbPress development.

Heck, even if someone took an existing plugin that didn’t work with bbPress 1.02 and updated it, this would be an improvement.

Perhaps this plugin contest could be scheduled/built around around the revamping/relaunching of the bbPress.org site and the introduction of the new bbPress codex section.

Thoughts? Anyone else willing to match a small donation toward such a contest? Haha, if people like this idea, the bbPress Theme contest comes next